


A Song to Stop the Sirens

by harlequinsequins



Category: Boardwalk Empire
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-23
Updated: 2012-03-23
Packaged: 2017-11-02 09:54:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/367715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/harlequinsequins/pseuds/harlequinsequins
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anna Citron Lansky reflects on her feelings for her husband, Meyer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Song to Stop the Sirens

**Author's Note:**

> Author's Notes: This was more of a writing exercise, a brief look into a character's subconscious. But I was pretty happy with how it turned out so I thought I'd post it anyway. This is Anna Citron Lansky, the wife of Meyer Lansky, who, in real life, was very much in love with him though it was inferred that he married her for convenience. I was unsure on Meyer's feelings for Anna - he was a very complicated person, and did not speak very often about his feelings. Anyway, read and enjoy! :)
> 
> Disclaimer - I don't own these characters. Based on the fictional series Boardwalk Empire.

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Sometimes, when I look back on our marriage, all I see is the waste. Wasted years, wasted youth, wasted hopes. I could fill a book up writing down everything that I have given up, that I have sacrificed, and all for him - for an affection that does not exist outside of words and make believe. This isn't how I thought it would be. I expected more, and perhaps that is where I went wrong. The world is not a page from a book. There is no magic first kiss that could make a still heart beat again. We are not creatures fashioned out of the whims of hopeless romantics.

I seemed to have forgotten all of that when I accepted Meyer's proposal.

I could have been someone. I could have traveled the world, gone to school, made something out of myself. I could have drifted far away from everything suffocating and familiar, like I always wanted to, and done what no girl has done before. I could have found a way to break through the restrictions of race and sexuality, found a way through them, if I only tried hard enough. But I wasted all that. That's what all this built up time has turned out to be. Wasted.

It started out when we were young. His eyes were everything soft and lovely and my parents never had a harsh word to say about him. I was nothing but a girl. I didn't understand that he was a liar and that there stood a wall of secrets between us. I know now that there is no climbing that wall. I didn't then, and the path I chose has led me to this realization that when I look at him - he is a tower of skin and concrete.

I've tried. the more I question, the further he pulls away, the further he slips through my fingers like water (and when I think on it, he is like water...changeable and cold and wild).

There's something that he's not telling me. And I wonder, and I wait for an answer that will never come, until the question feels like an ocean weighing down on us and I can't take the pressure. He is that ocean. A crushing bruising force that sweeps through the house like the tide and I can't breathe when he's around. I don't know if it's fear or hatred, sorrow or need. Or all of them in one. He doesn't even have to lift a hand to me or raise his voice to make me fear and hate him all at once.

Does it matter?

It doesn't to him.

There's this rule we all abide by, us fools in love. I can change him. Only the most hopeless, reckless and desperately in love can find a way to twist what is real and mold it into something fragile, a fantasy world that pulls a veil over the truth and makes it beautiful. There is no changing anyone. They'll change if they want to, and most of the time they don't. They stay the way they are until their bodies are lowered into the ground and it's too late for making exceptions to the rule that is the life they've lived. It took me a long time to learn that and I've had to take it with a grain of salt, no matter how painful it is against the wounds. That's just the way it is. My fairytale is over.

There is no changing Meyer. He is a liar, he is manipulative, he is cold. I have had to learn to accustom myself to these traits. To the loneliness that comes even when I can feel his body against my back. It's like he's not even here. Like i'm making love to a ghost. He is only half alive when he is home with me. It makes me wonder what he's like when he's fully awake, truly alive. Who is he outside the walls of this prison that I have made for him? There is only the darkness of ignorance when I think on him, on who he is, on where he goes. They frighten me, the formless shadows that I find in place of answers and certainty.

And I realize, slowly, that soon it will be over. That the emptiness around me, where his arms should be, might soon be filled again and I will be the one to fill it myself. If I'm patient, if I bundle my hopes and keep them safe with me, perhaps these long nights of waiting with only cold tea for comfort will all fade into silent memory. Weathering with time and intangible to touch. My only fear is that I won't know what to do when freedom finally comes. What will I do with it? I married so young. My life has been mending and cooking and washing and looking after the needs of a distant husband. It will be a struggle to find myself once outside the doldrums.

It will take time to learn. How to feel something outside of a deep, threading resentment that touches everything and leaves poison behind.

I have lost the rashness of youth and yet have nothing of the contentment of old age. Somewhere in between, I hang suspended, caught up as if in a web. And every day, it is the same. Silence over morning coffee. Silence over dinner. Silence in our room when he faces his wall and I face mine. Only when he turns over, punctures the unseen barrier between us, and pulls me into him. The silence withers and something like heat blooms in the way his voice breaks on the tip of his tongue and his touch and his skin burns me like a brand. I feel myself thaw when he reaches in and the numbness goes away, if just for a little while. That's when i remember - I love him, I do, even if that love no longer tastes sweet like it once did (when I was young and I walked down that aisle with stars in my eyes).

If I let her, she won't let go of him. Of that heat and those nights and the breath that crawls through my hair with his fingers. She'll want to save him. She'll want to hang on to what's left.

But always when the light comes and I remember, she'll disappear.

Because there is no winning this war.


End file.
